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Cooler Master Aquagate Mini Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Monday, April 04, 2005
Mini Upclose
The waterblock is made from solid copper with the contact area machined flat to ensure a good seal between waterblock and CPU. The four holes around the contact area are for the mounting plates that we will cover in a moment.
We here at Ninjalane are a curious folk that like to see how things are built. So, with the proper tools in hand we proceeded to disassemble the Aquagate Mini to see what was inside.
Inside the Aquagate we find that the waterblock is constructed very similar to an aircooled heatsink. The cooling fins are bonded to the copper base and segmented across the top. The lower area in the middle is similar to the outside but with shorter fins. Much like traditional 3 barb waterblocks that we have seen the Aquagate Mini has a center water inlet and supports up to 2 outlets. By default one of these ports is blocked. While this third barb is somewhat of a mystery I suspect this was how the system is initially filled.
The blue liquid is the cooling fluid; this is the same fluid you get with the Aquagate and smells much like window washer fluid on steroids.